This partial biography of Robinson's first forty years presents a new Robinson - not the 'Black Robinson' of Rae-Ellis, James Bonwick, John West and James Erskine Calder, nor the 'White Robinson' of Mark Twain - but a 'Grey Robinson', a grey robin with a red breast.

In 1787 the British Government sent a fleet to colonize Australia - The Fatal Shore is an epic description of this and subsequent brutal transportation of men, women and children out of Georgian Britain into a horrific penal system which was to be the precursor to the Gulag and was the origin of Australia.

In his first journey, Hamlin Baylis Wells, thirty years an undercover detective, has a major decision to make. His immaculate career and religious convictions are at odds with an impulsive decision not to declare a large sum of money found during a police operation.

Lavender farmer Luc Bonet is raised by a wealthy Jewish family in the foothills of the French Alps. When the Second World War breaks out he joins the French Resistance, leaving behind his family's fortune, their home overrun by soldiers, their lavender fields in disarray.

1829, Tasmania and John Batman, ruthless, singleminded; four convicts, the youngest still only a stripling; Gould, a downtrodden farmhand; two free black trackers; and powerful, educated Black Bill, brought up from childhood as a white man. This is the roving party and their purpose is massacre.

In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp in the remote Tasmanian highlands, when Sonja Buloh was three years old and her father was drinking too much, Sonja's mother walked into a blizzard never to return.